Originally Posted by amandasgramma
I had something sent to me priority......and the tracking system kept telling me it hadn't been sent by the sender yet!!!! One day, 4 days or so after it was to have been sent, I wrote the sender and asked why she hadn't sent it. Left the house, went by the mailbox and it was there! Later in the when I got home, I checked and the tracking system STILL said it hadn't been sent. And they wonder why the PO has problems, eh!
USPS had some major issues the beginning of this year, regarding scans on packages and tracking. Depending on how your package is handled - where it goes - it may or may not show up in their system. Typically, for us, if the package is scanned when it is picked up, we will see this acceptance scan, then we will see it go through our regional sorting center, and then we *may* see it go through a destination regional sorting center and/or a local Post Office, and then if the carrier remembers to scan it upon delivery, we will see that it has been delivered.
But... if the carrier forgets to scan the package when he/she picks it up ... or they forget to scan it enroute, or if USPS has problems with their software/computers, you can wind up with a big nothing in terms of tracking.
It's usually not much of a problem for domestic shipping; the package will be delivered in about 3 days, whether or not it has been scanned along the way.
But for internationals, that was a HUGE problem for us in January! It takes 2-3 weeks for those packages to be delivered, and in the meanwhile we had lots of worried and upset international customers who thought we had never sent their packages. I must have spent several DAYS worth of time on the phone with various USPS folks, trying to achieve resolution of this problem. (Not to mention the hours spent e-mailing and reassuring our international customers!) And we did get it all worked out, so things are running smoothly again.
(big sigh of relief)